The Brewers’ rebuilding plan has no room for error–but in one special case, time is the mitigating factor.
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It wasn’t supposed to go anything like this.
When Aramis Ramirez told reporters, back in January, that 2015 would likely be his last campaign as an active major-league player, both he and the Milwaukee Brewers envisioned him going out with a bang. While a Derek Jeter-style retirement gala was never going to be in the cards for Aramis, all parties involved were hopeful that Ramirez could provide one last season of a reliable middle-of-the-order stick, and that the Brewers could use this and other contributions to defy the experts’ predictions like they did for most of last season.
For both the Brewers and Ramirez, however, this season has instead been the worst-case scenario brought to life. The Brewers, as a team, couldn’t have come out flatter if they had been prepared on a griddle. This was a team constructed for everything to go right — and starting from Opening Day, everything went wrong.
Opening Day was a perfect blend of bad luck and inept performance. The Brewers collected eight hits — none of which went for extra bases — but were still kept out of the run column. The pitchers responsible for twirling the shutout were Kyle Kendrick, Rafael Betancourt, and Christrian Friedrich — as motley a crew to ever throw nine innings of opening-day scoreless ball as any in baseball history, or at least it feels that way. But when the final score is 10-0, your bad luck didn’t swing things as much as it highlighted them. On the bright side, Kyle Lohse will not go down as the worst Opening Day starter in Brewers’ history. But the bad news is that this is only because Rafael Roque unfortunately happened once upon a time, not because Lohse has looked like a quality major-league pitcher at any point.
Like the team’s Opening Day debacle, you can scapegoat bad luck for the offensive struggles of Aramis Ramirez — but only to a certain extent. Ramirez has batted .220 on balls in play this year, which is an impossibly low number should rise. However, Ramirez has also seemingly stopped worrying about pitch selectivity the past two seasons. He owns a walk rate of 7 percent over the course of his career, but for 2014 he walked at a 4 percent clip, and this year it has remained low at 4.5 percent. He’s swinging at 37.5 percent of pitches outside the zone, which is eight-percent higher than his career norm. Thus, the walks have dried up, but the hits have dried up, too — the end result is that Ramirez has posted an on-base percentage of .257. Yeah. On-base percentage. Of .257.
The Brewers are mired in last place of the NL Central, with an aging roster and a farm system that multiple experts rank as one of the worst in baseball. As such, every single player in the team’s control is considered a trade chip at this point. Hell, if someone offered up two top-50 prospects plus a sandwich pick for the rights to Bernie Brewer, I’m not entirely convinced the team would be wise to say no.
Ramirez, naturally, is considered by many the most likely to move. After all, he’s already said — and then reiterated — that 2015 is going to be his last go of it. With his track record of success and the Brewers desperate need for young assets of any flavor, it should be a lock that he’s on his way out this summer, but ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark isn’t so sure. While he listed Ramirez (along with closer Francisco Rodriguez) among his ten names to watch for in-season trades, he is not confident that Ramirez will be moved.
One reason for this is the above-mentioned performance issues. Basing one’s opinion off 2015 numbers, rather than name-brand reputation, Ramirez is only a hair better than replacement level. Even for teams in need of a third baseman, Ramirez represents more of a “potential upgrade” or “complimentary piece” at the hot corner, and that’s an optimistic view of it. He’s no longer the big-ticket acquisition he once was. And even though his .219 BABIP suggests he should be better from here on out, there’s reason to believe that might not be the case.
Ramirez’s hit-ball profile indicates that he has inexplicably stopped hitting the ball hard this year, and started making tons more soft contact than ever before. Out of 181 players with at least 100 qualifying at-bats, Baseball Savant ranks his batted ball exit velocity as 152nd. A look deeper reveals at least a partial reason why: Ramirez has been swinging at far more bad pitches outside of the strike zone since 2014, rising from a 29.9 percent career average to around 39.5 percent and 37.5 percent the past two years. And he’s making contact with over two thirds of those balls. Common sense suggests that there’s a lot of weak contact coming from these bad swings.
This could be a hidden injury, it could be a mentally-checked-out player trapped on a team he loathes, but the most likely reason for this is that Ramirez is simply aging — or a combination of the three. His eye isn’t as sharp, his reactions aren’t as quick, and he’s struggling to adapt to a game that feels like it’s speeding up around him. He’s no longer an MVP candidate, or an All-Star, or even a first-division starter. He’s a player who can barely beat replacement level. And if the Brewers don’t recognize this with their asking price, they will indeed see him retire in a Milwaukee uniform.
Another reason for the pessimism is his price tag. Ramirez is due $14 million for this season, and with the way he has played nobody wants to commit approximately half of that salary to import him. The Brewers, it is presumed, will not eat the remainder of his salary to be rid of him. But this is faulty reasoning, rooted in a mindset that typifies small-market teams as overwhelmingly stingy under all circumstances.
The truth is, owner Mark Attanasio is a businessman and, from a business perspective, paying the rest of Ramirez’s contract makes sense. The team has already budgeted for it. There is no situation in which the Brewers can choose between “pay Aramis’s contract” or “don’t pay that money” unless a taker emerges who is willing to absorb that salary. As we’ve established, this appears to be unlikely.
Here is the reality of the situation: the Brewers can either pay out Ramirez’s contract for him to run out the clock and soak up at-bats for a team destined to miss the postseason, they can pay Ramirez’s contract and force him into early retirement by benching him, or they could pay for him to serve as another team’s mercenary, in exchange for some kind of tangible young baseball talent. When viewed in that way, the choice seems obvious.
If the Brewers get less than what they perceive to be fair value for Ramirez, who was the ninth-place vote-getter in the NL MVP race just three years ago, that is perfectly acceptable. If the Brewers hold onto Ramirez, they get nothing. Retiring players fetch a team nothing in the way of draft picks, and Ramirez’s contract is off the books at the end of the year regardless of what action the team takes.
I know this. Readers know this. And we can bet that every front office in the game knows it. Except maybe the Phillies, if we’re being fair, but they’re not buying an age-advanced third baseman anyway so it doesn’t matter.
The Brewers don’t have a lot of young talent. The consistent draft misfirings from 2009 to 2011 have left them in a position where the front office cannot afford to make mistakes in righting the ship and retooling the team back into a contender. Allowing Ramirez to retire a Brewer in a non-playoff year would be a big mistake. Letting Ramirez retire a Brewer over money that is already a sunk cost would be a tragic mistake, the kind that a team with a bottom-tier farm system and no competitive chance in the short-term cannot afford to make.